JOAN MITCHELL AT BALTIMORE MUSEUM OF ART
MARCH 6, 2022 – AUGUST 14, 2022
JOAN MITCHELL AT
BALTIMORE MUSEUM OF ART
MARCH 6, 2022 – AUGUST
14, 2022
BALTIMORE, MD (February
1, 2022)—From March 6 through August 14, the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA)
presents Joan Mitchell, the long-awaited retrospective of the internationally
renowned artist who attained critical acclaim and success in the male-dominated
art circles of 1950s New York, then spent nearly four decades in France
creating breathtaking abstract paintings that evoke landscapes, memories,
poetry, and music. This comprehensive exhibition features 70 works spanning the
artist’s career, including rarely seen early paintings and drawings, vibrant
gestural paintings that established her reputation in New York, and enormous
multi-panel masterpieces from her later years that immerse viewers with their
symphonic color. Numerous loans from public and private collections in the U.S.
and Europe include works that have not been shown publicly in decades and never
in a single exhibition. The BMA’s presentation also includes many archival
photographs, letters, poems, and other materials from the Joan Mitchell Foundation,
providing additional context about the development of the artist’s work and
influences.
The BMA is the only East
Coast venue for Joan Mitchell. Tickets for the March 6– August 14 Baltimore
presentation are available beginning February 7. The exhibition debuted at
SFMOMA in September 2021, and a new presentation will open at the Fondation
Louis Vuitton in October 2022. In conjunction with the opening, the BMA will
begin extending its hours to 9 p.m. on Thursdays starting on March 10. Adding
evening hours is among the BMA’s strategic priorities as part of its efforts to
increase community access and is supported by a generous gift from the Rouse
Company Foundation. Additionally, the retrospective coincides with the final
month of the exhibition All Due Respect, which features new work by four
artists with ties to Baltimore who have previously received Joan Mitchell
Foundation awards. All Due Respect includes installations by Lauren Frances
Adams, Mequitta Ahuja, Cindy Cheng, and LaToya Hobbs, and highlights Mitchell’s
desire to support the lives and careers of working artists through her
foundation.
Co-organized with the San
Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), Joan Mitchell is the result of more
than three years of research and first-hand review of hundreds of paintings by
exhibition co-curators Katy Siegel, BMA Senior Programming & Research
Curator and Thaw Chair of Modern Art at Stony Brook University, and Sarah
Roberts, Andrew W. Mellon Curator of Painting and Sculpture at SFMOMA. They were
supported by research teams from both museums and Stony Brook University, as
well as a dedicated fellow funded by the Joan Mitchell Foundation. The
exhibition and its accompanying catalogue have established a new depth of
scholarship and understanding about Mitchell’s work as a transnational artist,
as well as her profound impact on the trajectory of art.
“Across her life, Joan
Mitchell experimented with how painting could embody physical experience and
capture a wide range of emotions—including grief, sensual pleasure, humor, joy,
and a kind of metaphysical soaring in the face of death—as well as connections
to people and places,” said Siegel. “Mitchell also grappled with conflict
between the social roles prescribed by her gender and social status and her desire
for true creative freedom. She was not simply ‘making it’ in an environment
created and occupied by men, she was actively remaking painting and its
possibilities. This exhibition is an opportunity to ask what it means to live a
life with art at its center and to reconsider the art and narratives of the
postwar era.”
Throughout her extensive
career, Mitchell immersed herself in color and gesture in her studio, and was
also deeply grounded in place and landscape, resulting in a singular style of
painting that is at once abstract and connected to the world. Her works share
evocations of feeling, as she physically expressed the sensations aroused by
relationships; memories; the cities Chicago, New York, and Paris; the
countryside of the Mediterranean; and Vétheuil, the French village where the
artist made her home. The power of this approach can be seen in her vibrant
articulations of urban environments in New York City in paintings like The
Bridge (1956) and To the Harbormaster (1957), lush French landscapes like South
(1989), and works that engage with the legacy of Vincent Van Gogh, such as No
Rain (1976) and Sunflowers (1990-91). Photographs of views and other paintings
that inspired Mitchell will be shown alongside her paintings, capturing the way
she connected to the natural world and to everyday life.
The exhibition also
examines the essential role of music and poetry in Mitchell’s work. Immersed in
culture from childhood, Mitchell’s personal and collaborative relationships
with writers and musicians in both the U.S. and France are key to her story. As
her artistic style developed, the sometimes ambiguous and often personal nature
of lyrics, lines of poetry, and musical compositions dovetailed with painting’s
capacity to express what cannot be named or explained. Two multi-panel
paintings, Ode to Joy (A Poem by Frank O’Hara) (1970-71) and La Vie en Rose
(1979), demonstrate the relationships between Mitchell’s passion for the arts
across its many disciplines and the way it propelled her practice. The BMA’s exhibition
emphasizes this with an immersive soundscape featuring quotes taken from
Mitchell's writing and interviews voiced by actor Nadine Malouf, literature
significant to the artist read by poet Eileen Myles, and music dear to
Mitchell, from jazz standards to opera. The experience is optimized for
headphones in the gallery and accessible for visitors through an app on their
mobile device or a player borrowed from the museum.
UNTITLED,
1948
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions:
45 1/4 × 34 3/4 in. (114.9 × 88.3 cm.)
Framed: 51
1/16 × 40 1/2 × 3 3/8 in. (129.7 × 102.9 × 8.6 cm.)
Joan Mitchell
Foundation, New York
FIGURE AND
THE CITY, 1949-1950
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions:
40 × 49 in. (101.6 × 124.5 cm.)
Framed: 46 ×
54 3/4 × 3 5/8 in. (116.8 × 139.1 × 9.2 cm.)
Joan Mitchell
Foundation, New York
© Estate of
Joan Mitchell
Mitchell
declared of this work, “I knew it was the last figure I would ever paint. I
just knew. And it was.” Figure and the City marks the end of Mitchell’s
first stay in France (on an artist’s fellowship from 1948 to 1949) and the
beginning of her fresh start in New York. After this painting, “the paintings
became the city,” as she put it, with color and form conveying the look and
feel of being in the urban landscape.
CITY
LANDSCAPE, 1955
Oil on Linen
Dimensions:
80 x 80 in.
The Art
Institute of Chicago, Gift of Society for
Contemporary
American Art, 1958.193
© Estate of
Joan Mitchell
HUDSON RIVER
DAY LINE, 1955
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions:
Overall: 79 × 83 in. (200.7 × 210.8 cm.)
Collection of the McNay Art Museum, Museum Purchase With
Funds From the Tobin Foundation
BELLE BETE,
1973
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions:
102 1/4 x 70 3/4 in.
Richard and
Mary Jo Kovacevich, San Francisco
© Estate of
Joan Mitchell
LA LIGNE DE
LA RUPTURE, 1970-1971
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions:
112 x 79 in.
Private
Collection c/o Ekyn Maclean
© Estate of
Joan Mitchell
This
atmospheric painting, with its floating geometry, is titled after a poem by
Mitchell’s close friend, Jacques Dupin. Painter and poet both play with
structure and its disruption. Mitchell fragments her canvas, the gridded forms
set off by turbulent dappling and fine-tipped brushwork streaked in contrasting
colors, while Dupin breaks traditional sentence structure with sharp shifts of
language and subject. The artist made this painting during the period when she
was the most intimately connected to French poetry.
WEEDS, 1976
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions:
110 1/2 × 157 1/2 in. (280.7 × 400.1 cm.)
Hirshhorn
Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution,
Washington,
DC, Gift of Joseph H. Hirshhorn, 1977
© Estate of
Joan Mitchell
Weeding, like
painting, is an act of disciplined decision-making: some elements must be
brought under control so that others may thrive. Limited vertical strokes and
petal-like dabs build energy in this two-panel painting. Paired
colors—complementary blues and oranges, pinks and greens—intensify a restricted
palette. Mitchell uses color and brushwork to reinforce, or leap across, the
boundary between the two panels.
Many of
Mitchell’s favorite plants—wild oaks, honeysuckle, daisies, dandelions,
sunflowers—might be considered weeds. They are resilient species that are often
unwanted, but radiate tough beauty nonetheless. Mitchell herself identified as
something of a weed, having resisted social rules to flourish on her own terms
as an artist and as a person.
NO RAIN, 1976
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions:
110 × 158 in. (279.4 × 401.3 cm)
The Museum of
Modern Art, New York, Gift of The Estate of Joan Mitchell
© Estate of
Joan Mitchell
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ODE TO JOY (A
POEM BY FRANK O’HARA) 1970-1971
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions:
110 1/2 × 197 1/4 in. (280.7 × 501 cm.)
Framed: 111
1/2 × 198 1/2 × 2 in. (283.2 × 504.2 × 5.1 cm.)
University at
Buffalo Art Galleries: Gift of Rebecca Anderson, 1988
© Estate of
Joan Mitchell
Swelling
edge-to-edge with broad swaths of color, this multipanel painting emphasizes
blocks of paint set in counterpoint rather than the individual strokes that
dominated her previous paintings. For Mitchell, structure evoked Ludwig van
Beethoven’s symphonies, and one can imagine that composer’s “Ode to Joy,” as
well as the O’Hara poem, as the booming, immersive, and exuberant counterparts
to this majestic painting.
SUNFLOWER VI,
1969
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions:
Overall: 102 1/4 × 63 1/4 in. (259.7 × 160.7 cm.)
Framed: 103
1/2 × 64 in. (262.9 × 162.6 cm.)
Williams
College Museum of Art, Anonymous gift, in tribute to
Linda
Shearer and her late husband Hartley Shearer
The towering
sunflowers at La Tour, in various stages of bloom and droop, were a compelling
subject for Mitchell and remained a touchstone for decades. The Sunflower
series evokes the flowers at their peak, bursting with light, color, and
energy, reflecting a moment of joyful expansion and optimism as she embraced
life in the countryside. Mitchell saw the flowers as individuals: “I don’t
like fields of sunflowers. I like them alone, or, of course, painted by van
Gogh.”
SANS PIERRE,
1969
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions:
102 1/2 x 78 1/2 in.
The Long View
Legacy LLC
© Estate of
Joan Mitchell
MY LANDSCAPE,
II 1967
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions:
103 × 71 1/2 in. (261.6 × 181.6 cm.)
Framed: 103
7/8 × 72 1/8 × 1 1/2 in. (263.8 × 183.2 × 3.8 cm.)
Smithsonian
American Art Museum, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. David K. Anderson,
Martha
Jackson Memorial Collection
ALSO
RETURNED, 1969
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions:
25 1/2 × 21 1/4 in. (64.8 × 54 cm.)
Private
Collection
RED TREE,
1976
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions:
Overall: 110 3/8 × 63 in. (280.4 × 160 cm.)
Framed: 117
3/4 × 70 1/2 × 2 3/4 in. (299.1 × 179.1 × 7 cm.)
Fondation
Louis Vuitton, Paris
© Estate of
Joan Mitchell
AIRES POUR
MARION 1975-1976
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions:
Overall: 94 × 142 in. (238.8 × 360.7 cm.)
From the
Collection of Joan and Preston Haskell
© Estate of Joan Mitchell
SANS NEIGE,
1969
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions:
102 1/4 × 197 in. (259.7 × 500.4 cm.) Framed: 103 1/4 × 198 × 1 5/8 in.
(262.3 ×
502.9 × 4.1 cm.) 3 panels: L & R 102 1/4 x 63; Middle 102 1/4 x 71
Framed: L
& R 103 1/4 x 63 1/2; Middle 103 1/4 x 71
Carnegie
Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Gift of the Hillman Foundation, 70.46.4.A.-.C
SKETCHBOOK C.
1948
Graphite
Pencil, Fabricated Graphite Pencil, Pen and Ink, Wax Crayon,
and opaque
watercolor on paper Overall
Dimensions:
(closed): 10 1/4 × 7 7/8 × 5/8 in. (26 × 20 × 1.6 cm.)
Joan Mitchell
Foundation Archives, New York
© Estate of
Joan Mitchell
SKETCHBOOK C.
1948
Graphite
Pencil, Fabricated Graphite Pencil, Wax Crayon,
Pen and Ink,
and Oil Paint on Paper
Dimensions:
Overall: 10 1/4 × 7 7/8 × 1/2 in. (26 × 20 × 1.3 cm.)
Joan Mitchell
Foundation Archives, New York CUBIST
© Estate of
Joan Mitchell
LA VIE EN
ROSE, 1979
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions:
Overall: 110 1/2 × 267 15/16 × 4 in. (280.7 × 680.6 × 10.2 cm.) Other (far
left panel): 110 1/2 × 70 7/8 × 1 1/8 in. (280.7 × 180 × 2.9 cm.) Other
(center left
panel): 110 1/4 × 63 1/8 × 1 1/4 in. (280 × 160.3 × 3.2 cm.) Other (center
right panel): 110 3/8 × 63 1/8 × 1 1/4 in. (280.4 × 160.3 × 3.2 cm.) Other
(far right panel):
110 1/2 × 70
7/8 × 1 1/4 in. (280.7 × 180 × 3.2 cm.)
Lent by The
Metropolitan Museum of Art, Anonymous Gift and Purchase,
George A.
Hearn Fund, by Exchange, 1991 (1991.139a-d)
LA VIE EN ROSE BY KATY
SIEGEL
“I love you very much and
I treasure your unbribable (UNBRIBABLE) soul.”1 Mitchell’s beloved Edrita Fried
wrote her after a visit to Vétheuil around 1980, adding a drawing of Mitchell’s
twinned music and spirit (at left). The years 1979 to 1986 swelled with ambition—for
art, not career—and the achievement in her work manifested a metaphysical depth
born of a life surveyed, prompted, but not determined, by loss and death. These
years were shaped as well by her friendship with an electric younger artist,
already a true peer, the composer Gisèle Barreau. Their intimacy and mutual
support deepened Mitchell’s relationship to music and also to nature, as
Barreau’s pleasure and skill with plants forged a more authentic connection to
the gardens of La Tour. Mitchell’s paintings reached a new expanse, even as she
grew more present in and anchored to the concrete details of her life.
In early 1979, Mitchell
flew to New York in the wake of the betrayal by Jean Paul Riopelle and Hollis
Jeffcoat, for a “crash-shrink program” with Fried.2 When she returned to
Vétheuil in April, she found that Lefèbvre-Foinet had delivered canvas and also
cleaned the studio. She reworked and began new pastels, playing her favorite
painting music, wanting to want to paint.3 Spring came late that year; “the
lilacs just bloomed” in May when Mitchell herself came back to life and began
to paint on a daily basis, beginning the enormous quadriptych La Vie en rose
(1979, plate 99), whose muted pinks and lavenders play on the “rose” of the
title, and perhaps the lilacs as well.4 In the dozens of photos of the panels
in progress, one can see that the early version of what would become the far
left panel was much more of a Tilleul stroke, vertical and black, and tiered,
to be later complicated with blue, masked with white and lilac/gray, and
dappled with shorter touches, all of which made it more massed centrally (fig.
9.1). The photos show Mitchell trying out different sequences—in the end, she
arrives at what now seems inevitable and would become characteristic: two
narrow central panels flanked by slightly wider “side” panels. The painting’s
title ironically echoes Mitchell’s long-ago declaration that upon arriving in
Paris, “la vie en rose begins”; it also conjures the defiant, tragic image of
Édith Piaf—tiny, swathed in black and starkly spotlighted on a grand stage—as
Mitchell had seen her perform at Carnegie Hall.5
La Vie en rose was the
first painting Barreau saw when she arrived in Vétheuil in late May of 1979—it
seems that Mitchell had blazed through the quadriptych in just a few weeks.6
Betsy Jolas had suggested that Barreau—who, like herself, had been a student of
Olivier Messiaen at the Paris Conservatory7—come to help Mitchell and take care
of her dogs. Mitchell had interviewed her in New York and described her in a
letter to her sister, Sally Perry: “a very talented young lady composer . . .
she’s frighteningly serious but interesting.”8 Barreau had won many prizes—at
the conservatory, in France, and in the United States—and was widely regarded as
brilliant and intense; Mitchell responded immediately to the kind of artistic
and ethical rigor she had earlier attributed to Samuel Beckett.9 In her music,
Barreau, like Mitchell, construed the lyric as color, meaning timbre and the
range of effects possible with different instruments; she also welcomed
experimentation, taking a diploma in electroacoustic music the same year she
graduated from the conservatory.10 Scores like Aires pour Marion and Sterne
(see pages 292 and 321) are enormous and complex, with many divided parts, and
use drawings to specify the spatial positions of musicians, conductor, and
audience in order to create particular sonic effects. Sterne made an overall
impression of a “very massive sound—very moving,” as Mitchell noted on the program
for the concert, where it was performed alongside works by Arnold Schoenberg
and Gilbert Amy.11
The seven large
quadriptychs Mitchell made between 1979 and 1982 match the immense scale of
Barreau’s compositions—as the composer wrote to Joyce Pensato and Carl Plansky
in the fall of 1980 (the text in a spiral to form the heart of the sunflower
she drew), she and Mitchell “had a bet” about their respective works, due in
January, pressing each other onward.12 By late 1980, Mitchell had been invited
to have a solo exhibition at the Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris, a
high-profile promise that also spurred her on; she would eventually show six of
these enormous paintings at the museum in her summer 1982 exhibition.13 The
first large aintings, La Vie en rose and Salut Tom (1979, plate 100), begin
from the broad view of the Seine and the compositional gambits of the late
1960s, but she opened the composition with white and continued the percussive
rendering of the late 1970s. Those paintings were a touchstone; as Mitchell
complained, “Part of my problem is to make a single pic & I have only
really succeeded with ‘Barge’ & the Linden trees before in years.”14 Since
the mid1960s, her single panels had all been vertical: they did not have the
sweeping landscape feeling of the quadriptychs, which sometimes began as
diptychs to which Mitchell added “side” panels whose more vertical, fuller
compositions framed a central image.15 In the diptychs she felt a “twoness,”
manifested in subtle relationships between the panels: symmetry, continuity,
repetition, and difference.16 One striking instance is Cypress (fig. 9.3), in
which the motif of doubling takes the very deliberate form of two marks placed
on either side of the diptych’s divide. She had different versions of twoness;
in Two Pianos (1980, plate 101), made in response to Barreau’s composition
Piano Piano, Mitchell did not knit together the divide through repetition or a
crossing stroke—the two panels harmonize and respond to each other in
counterpoint. The undergirding of deep blue resurfaces across the whole, veiled
by lavender and yellow-orange. The two colors are laid on with similar short
vertical strokes across the tops of both canvases, but the colors are kept
separate; in the center, there is more mixing of the colors, with orange-yellow
used to accent the lavender, and vice versa, but the strokes vary—dense on the
left, open and broad on the right. The diptych is bound externally rather than
internally, with a few late additions of long orange marks on the far edges.
Each panel has its own logic, its autonomy, while working in relation to the
other.
These relations became
more complex and various, even as Mitchell simplified the paintings in other
ways. One new vision for the larger works was a diagonal swell that crescendoed
from left to right. Less familiar than the river views of La Seine and Salut
Tom, this compositional approach had a source in nature: the Vétheuil garden
Barreau had taken over. It was “small” in scale and also in the personal, unruly
selection of plants made in defiance of Jean Perthuis’s ordered landscaping,
with climbing plants, daisies, and other flowers that, like wildflowers and
weeds, did not register as valuable in the hierarchy of formal gardening.17
Mitchell delighted in the irony of making this intimate place into a
“mural”-scale quadriptych: “She’s redoing ‘her garden’ & it looks
beautiful. I titled my big pic for Washington ‘a small garden.’”18 The painting
features the colors of flowers Barreau planted in the small garden Mitchell
passed on the daily walk to her atelier—white, yellow, the blue of bleuets, the
morning glories climbing the edges of the fence—to which Mitchell added black
tulips (fig. 9.2).19 The younger woman brought Mitchell into her own grounds,
made her feel the gardens did, in fact, belong to her (see page 313), and while
Mitchell never worked in the garden to the extent that Barreau did, the artist
discovered a litany of specific flowers that she loved: begonias, asters,
peonies, roses (fig. 9.4).20 Mitchell learned to attend to the color and feel
of types of plants, even the life cycles of individual flowers—a drooping
aster, the symbolic rebirth of the amaryllis every year (plate 111). Barreau
and Mitchell planted a pumpkin, a plant with a fast life cycle, right outside
Mitchell’s studio door so she could see and measure the daily change.
It was only fitting that
when Fried died unexpectedly in November of 1981, Mitchell conjured her
continued presence in a painting (plate 102) and, with Barreau, in a dedicated
garden (see page 312). “She’s certainly alive,” Mitchell wrote to her sister.21
During Mitchell’s absence the following spring, Barreau wrote, “Edrita’s garden
will be very pretty in one month—Her peonies are working okay—We had a cup of
iced tea together—nice time, près de la petite table de méditation—I would have
preferred a Coca-Cola, but so.”22 Mitchell was visiting Perry in Santa Barbara
after many years; her sister’s diagnosis of advanced cancer shadowed her all
through 1982, even as she was comforted by daily pleasures—a conundrum
emphasized in the titles of works, from A Small Garden to the Petits matins
(both 1982, plates 108 and 109). Mitchell painted these exquisite small
canvases, among the most sheerly beautiful of her career, as she struggled with
Perry’s impending death, traveling back and forth to Santa Barbara in fact and
in letters, calls, and her thoughts, while also working through the
complications around her exhibition at the Musée d’art moderne de la ville de
Paris. As she wrote to Plansky and Pensato while installing in the summer of
1982, “Hope you’ll like my late ‘terminal pics’—I didn’t title them that [but]
rather ‘Petit matin’ which is when the dawn rises. Guess the show has to do
with my life.”23
She was reflecting back
on the entirety of her life with her sister as a vast landscape of familial
romance— “moitié cachée, moitié pardonée”—and also in great detail: “I can
resurrect 190 E. Chestnut in its entirety (recall)—the furniture etc.
etc.—& all the walks to the playground . . . Barbara McClurgh’s BD parties
& chicken à la king—looking over lake . . . it’s (recall) nice to have in
my—imaginary—valise because I can go back to 190 or wherever when I want to”
(fig. 9.5).24 The barrage of letters exchanged by the sisters shifts seamlessly
between past and present, the latter mostly in the form of highly detailed
tales of dogs, particularly Perry’s Malinois, to whom Joan reported she was
dedicating a painting, Pour ses Malinois (1981).25 Perry died in the summer of
1982, and among the first works Mitchell painted after her death was a series
of nine paintings whose titles, taken from the tune “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,”
recall childhood, the metaphor of “going down the stream,” and also life as a
round, starting over and over (plates 104–7). At almost the same moment,
Mitchell’s exhibition opened at the Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris
with paintings from her last twelve years, a third of which had never before
been shown, including two for her sister. If most reviewers fell back on
invoking Monet and Abstract Expressionism, longtime interlocutor Pierre
Schneider raised the stakes, asking whether Mitchell was “la dernière héritière
de la grande tradition?”26
Even if the tradition was
“grande,” it was the petit that inspired: “Moments of euphoria—epiphany— a
poem—a flower—a pic—are so acute.”27 And these moments also comforted. As
Barreau typically exhorted Mitchell as the composer was departing for one of
her many absences for fellowships, concerts, and teaching, “les reine-marguerites
vont être superbes, plus toutes les tulipes a venir, plus narcisses—Go inside
and have a look at my primevères—2 sont fleuries—très discrètes—Full of
everything—Pick some walnuts—You are not alone.”28 What Fried had called “the
artist’s penchant for identifications,” a kind of “pantheism” directed at
natural objects, meant something very different from losing oneself in the
vastness of water or field: it meant caring deeply for something as small as a
flower, which gives back to the caregiver.29 Together with Barreau, Pensato,
Plansky, and other friends, Mitchell staged photo sessions in the gardens,
treating each sunflower and squash as a model. In a passionate letter to
Pensato—somewhat lost herself at the time—Mitchell urged her to put aside the
mirror and turn to something “outside yourself.” 30 She was warning against not
only the self-regarding gaze of the young artist, but also the current revival
of German Expressionist painting, contrasting its harsh blackand-white palette
and self-aggrandizement with the colors and external gaze of French painting.31
As an antidote to harsh grandiosity, Mitchell exhorted friends to read Hugo von
Hofmannsthal: “He does that spiritual thing with things.”32 She was also
reading and rereading Rainer Maria Rilke for his sympathetic view of objects,
which transcended the separate entities of nature and self to touch the
eternal.33 As he wrote, “External world and vision everywhere coincided as it
were in the object; in each a whole inner world was displayed, as though an
angel who embraces space were blind and gazing into himself.”34
These years saw Mitchell
more open to the spiritual than at any other point in her life. As Barreau saw
it, seventeenth-century metaphysicians understood a human’s inner workings long
before Sigmund Freud, and her own lyricism had a mystical vein. The libretto
for Barreau’s Aires pour Marion, a volcanic composition for chorus and
percussion, borrows from the mystical poem Vents (“Winds”) by Saint-John Perse,
sung and whispered by the voices. Mitchell was also spending time with Philippe
le Thomas, a young doctor in the process of becoming a monk. Recalling a
late-night studio visit spent viewing Chez ma soeur (1981–82), a quadriptych
dedicated to Perry, the newly ordained Frère Luc wrote:
“And then the wondrous,
transcendent moment, mesmerized by reality and the divine emanating from your
studio, transported, thrilled by the intensity of the emotion, eyes flowering
with color, the gold and the pink veil, and the frisson and the dance, the duet
from the Bach cantata. . . . And you spoke of your sister and I spoke of death,
God, life, love and . . . ecstasy.35”
He was referring to the
duet in Bach’s Cantata no. 78, an expression of gratitude for the liberation
from sin brought by Christ’s self-sacrifice, which had spurred their intense
discussions.36 Mitchell had lost her sister; 1983 was also the year she began
the cycle of La Grande Vallée paintings (as discussed by David Max Horowitz on
pages 300–301). Inspired by the longing of a young cousin of Barreau’s to
revisit, before his death, the valley that had been their secret place, the
cycle (see plates 111, 112, 113) brings together the light-hearted paradise
Barreau and Mitchell imagined for Edrita Fried (wined and dined, tended to by
two adoring young men) and a powerful vision of eternal life.37 Several of the
twenty-one paintings of the cycle were dedicated to friends—Plansky, Frère Luc,
Iva (Mitchell’s German shepherd)—human and animal.
In the summer of 1984,
Mitchell was diagnosed with jaw cancer and underwent radiation, like her sister
and mother before her; the following year she required hip surgery. The titles
of the suites she made in the following years note the recurrence of illness
and weakness, both in her own life and in more distant memory: Before, Again IV
(1985, plate 114) and Between, Then, Last Time. 38 Faded Air I (1985, plate
116) takes a dying sunflower as its subject, lightly, fluidly painted across
two panels, combining the single vertical subject with the diagonal composition
of A Small Garden and Edrita Fried (1981, plate 102) to create the sensation of
droop and drop, a gentle succumbing to gravity.39 Her strokes become longer,
curving, calligraphic, a habit of hand that would continue throughout the
mid-1980s. The year 1985 was difficult; between the February declaration that
she was cancer-free and hip surgery in December, she painted very little,
although beautifully. Her mood of reflection, including invocations of Marcel
Proust and Rilke (themselves touchstones from earlier moments), was colored by
a vivid awareness of the cycle of life and the certainty of endings.40 Mitchell
was listening to Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs, whose texts by Hermann
Hesse and Joseph von Eichendorff, underlined by a musical quotation from
Strauss’s early “Death and Transfiguration,” evoke intense experience of nature
and gardens in an accepting awareness of death: “We are resting from our
travels/ now, in the quiet countryside.”41
In 1986 and 1987,
Mitchell returned from her illnesses to paint three significant suites, titled
River, Lille, and Chord, amidst ongoing sadness. Iva, “the mother” and her most
beloved dog, died in September 1986 after a long, full life. Much more difficult
was the knowledge that Xavier Fourcade had AIDS; she may have known in 1985,
when she titled a tall, narrow work Xavier, and she certainly knew by the
spring of 1986, when she visited New York. As Mitchell described her time in
the city, AIDS was “a shadow in the garden”; she was relieved to return to
Vétheuil, where “I do cling to the garden to somehow chase away all those
horror images I experienced in N.Y.”42 She sought escape, quoting Frank
O’Hara’s Ode to Joy: “And there shall be no more dying in the supper clubs.”43
Though the cycle of River paintings returns to a favorite subject, we no longer
survey the Seine from a familiar viewpoint, but dive into the rushing waters,
evoked by rippling strokes and turpentine-thinned drips that flow across the canvas
to create a new kind of space (plate 117). During this grim time, it is easy to
imagine that Mitchell was alluding to the sensation of drowning; one painting
from this period was titled Ready for the River, and she had long used the
fight to keep one’s head above water as a metaphor for emotional and physical
threat.44 That fall she spent time with Fourcade in Paris, where he sought
treatment; in December they traveled to Lille to see the Henri Matisse
exhibition from the Hermitage Museum, which inspired her Lille works. On the
way, they stopped to visit the Cathedral of Saint-Pierre in Beauvais,
commemorated in the soaring Beauvais (fig. 9.6). 45 These paintings, and the
Chord suite that followed, are jewel-toned and white lit, moving between
density and openness with ease, evidencing intensity but not struggle. Fourcade
died in April 1987.
s always, painting gave
Mitchell more than a place to put her feelings. Barreau describes her
composition Piano, Piano as embodying the idea of “un monde dans lequel le
temps est annulé”;46 Mitchell had always seen painting’s special capacity to
elude time, and this quality grew more important to her in the face of so much
mortality, her own included.Speaking with Yves Michaud, she told him that in
her head she was snapping his picture, a still image that would keep him
eternally alive. That she would “frame” him, as she framed her paintings, at
first by limning their edges with brushstrokes, and then, later, using side
panels to bracket one or two canvases.47 Mitchell put all of this into a
late-night note, wisecracking and serious, left for Linda Nochlin to read in
the morning at Vétheuil: “I want to see the ‘altar’ piece—honey I ain’t
religious—but Catholics think I am—a good pic—held—(not Al
Held)—Silent—beautiful—ie—nothing to do with life—death—time—only it’s [sic]
edges—frames—still—ie quiet, not Clifford [sic]—lousy painter—existing
always—all great pics do this.”48
You may reach the catalog
to read whole essays to click below link.
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SORBES DE LA
NUIT D'ETE, POEM PASTEL WITH JACQUES DUPIN, 1975
Pastel and
Ink on Paper
Dimensions:
13 7/8 × 9 1/4 in. (35.2 × 23.5 cm.)
Framed: 17
11/16 × 13 in. (45 × 33 cm.)
Private
Collection
© Estate of
Joan Mitchell
DAYLIGHT,
WITH POEM BY JAMES SCHUYLER C. 1975
Pastel and
Ink on Paper
Dimensions:
14 × 9 in. (35.6 × 22.9 cm.)
Framed: 19
1/4 × 24 7/8 × 1 in. (48.9 × 63.2 × 2.5 cm.)
Collection of
Nathan Kernan
BONJOUR
JULIE, 1971
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions:
110 1/4 × 228 3/4 in. (280 × 581 cm.)
Framed: 112 × 230 in. (284.5 × 584.2 cm.) Collection of the Art Fund, Inc. at the
Birmingham Museum of Art; Purchase with funds provided by the Merton
Brown Estate and the Thelma Brown Trust
© Estate of
Joan Mitchell
LA GRANDE
VALLE E XVI, POUR IVA, 1983.
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions:
1021/4 × 783/4 in. (259.7 × 200 cm).
Joan Mitchell
Foundation, New York
© Estate of
Joan Mitchell
SALUT TOM,
1979
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions:
Overall: 110 1/2 × 316 in. (280.7 × 802.6 cm.)
Each Panel:
110 7/16 × 78 5/8 in. (280.5 × 199.7 cm.)
National
Gallery of Art, Washington, Corcoran Collection (Gift of the Women's Committee
of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and Museum Purchase with the aid of funds from
the National Endowment for the Arts), 2014.136.135
© Estate of
Joan Mitchell
The
sun-washed atmosphere of this quadriptych, a fourpaneled painting, recalls the
river Seine as seen from Mitchell’s terrace on a summer day. With such massive,
multi-panel works, Mitchell conveyed the sweeping view of the landscape while
also exploring painting’s capacity to “stop time, or frame it.”
Mitchell
painted this work in memory of her friend, art critic Thomas B. Hess, who had
recently died. She felt she could keep loved ones like Hess eternally alive in
paintings, their spirit held, framed by the two flanking side panels. Salut Tom
is one of seven quadriptychs that Mitchell made as she prepared to fill the
walls of her first major French museum show at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la
Ville de Paris in 1982.
BLUE TREE,
1964
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions:
96 5/8 × 78 in. (245.4 × 198.1 cm.)
Framed: 97
1/8 × 78 1/2 in. (246.7 × 199.4 cm.)
Worcester Art
Museum, Worcester, MA, Museum Purchase, 1965.392
© Estate of
Joan Mitchell
MUD TIME, 1960.
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 82
x 78 inches (208.28 x 198.12 cm).
© Estate of
Joan Mitchell.
A turbulent
swirl of conflicting hues shows Mitchell risking muddiness—the collapse of
color and legible marks into chaos— to achieve a new and more challenging kind
of beauty. The title references Robert Frost’s poem “Two Tramps in Mud Time,”
in which a narrator laboriously splits logs during the slushy period between
winter and spring, vividly evoking the artist’s struggle with the viscous oil
paint.
GIROLAA
TRIPTYCH, 1963
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions:
Overall: 76 7/8 × 127 5/8 in. (195.3 × 324.2 cm.)
Private
Collection
© Estate of
Joan Mitchell
LYRIC C. 1951
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions:
68 × 72 1/2 in. (172.7 × 184.2 cm.)
Framed: 69 ×
73 × 1 1/2 in. (175.3 × 185.4 × 3.8 cm.)
Frances
Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, gift of William Rubin, 1960.4.2
© Estate of
Joan Mitchell
Controlled as
well as explosive, Lyric puzzles together organic forms, often outlined in
black, to build on Mitchell’s absorption of earlier abstraction by European
modern artists like Wassily Kandinsky. The painting was shown at Mitchell’s
first New York gallery exhibition in 1952 and earned immediate attention. This
gorgeous whirlwind captivated the young art historian William Rubin, future
curator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, who pawned his oboe to buy it.
TWO PIANOS,
1980
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions:
Overall: 110 × 142 in. (279.4 × 360.7 cm.)
Private
Collection
© Estate of
Joan Mitchell
UNTITLED C.
1961
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions:
118 1/8 × 78 3/4 × 1 1/4 in. (300 × 200 × 3.2 cm.)
Framed: 119
3/8 × 79 7/8 × 1 3/4 in. (303.2 × 202.9 × 4.4 cm.)
Collection of
the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Gift of Anne and John Marion
© Estate of
Joan Mitchell
WATER GATE
1960
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions:
86 x 84 in.
Private
Collection, Courtesy of McClain Gallery
© Estate of Joan Mitchell
UNTITLED,
1978
Pastel on
Paper
Dimensions:
Overall: 22 7/8 × 16 5/8 in. (58.1 × 42.2 cm.)
Joan Mitchell
Foundation, New York
© Estate of
Joan Mitchell
UNTITLED,
1978
Pastel on
Paper
Dimensions:
Overall: 22 7/8 × 16 5/8 in. (58.1 × 42.2 cm.)
Joan Mitchell
Foundation, New York
© Estate of
Joan Mitchell
VETHEUIL,
1967-1968
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions:
Unframed: 76 3/4 × 49 7/8 in. (194.9 × 126.7 cm.)
Framed: 79 ×
53 5/16 × 2 1/4 in. (200.7 × 135.5 × 5.7 cm.)
Private
Collection, New York
RUSSIAN
EASTER, 1967.
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 78 7/8 x 58 1/8 inches (200.343 x 147.638 cm).
© Estate of Joan Mitchell.
TO THE
HARBORMASTER, 1957
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions:
76 x 118 in.
AKSART LP
© Estate of
Joan Mitchell
This
panoramic painting embodies the vast expanse of water between New York and
Paris. A range of blues nearly fills the canvas, structured by strong red
strokes that cross and contradict earlier marks, dissolving the line between
sky and sea. The decisive marks build a clear rhythm, matching Mitchell’s
newfound confidence as an artist with deep emotion. For Mitchell, the view of
the Atlantic Ocean represented her many departures and arrivals—also the
subject of close friend Frank O’Hara’s famous poem, “To the Harbormaster.”
I wanted to
be sure to reach you;
though my
ship was on the way it got caught
in some
moorings. I am always tying up
and then
deciding to depart.
—Frank
O’Hara, “To the Harbormaster,” 1957
LA LANDE,
1977
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions:
Overall: 18 1/2 × 15 in. (47 × 38.1 cm.)
Private
Collection
© Estate of
Joan Mitchell
LA GRANDE
VALLEE II (AMARYLLIS) 1983
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions:
86 × 75 1/2 in. (218.4 × 191.8 cm.)
Framed: 88 ×
80 in. (223.5 × 203.2 cm.)
Private
Collection, Courtesy Guggenheim, Asher Associates
© Estate of
Joan Mitchell
UNTITLED,
1992
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions:
110 1/4 x 142 in.
Komal Shah
& Gaurav Garg Collection
© Estate of
Joan Mitchell
SUNFLOWERS,
1990-1991
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions:
110 1/4 × 157 1/2 in. (280 × 400.1 cm.)
Framed: 113
3/4 × 161 3/8 in. (288.9 × 409.9 cm.)
Collection of
John Cheim
© Estate of
Joan Mitchell
NO BIRDS, 1987–88
Oil on canvas
Dimensions:
Overall: 86 3/4 × 156 1/4 in. (220.3 × 396.9 cm.)
Private Collection; © Estate of Joan Mitchell; Photo: Kris Graves
© Estate of
Joan Mitchell
This V-shaped
composition, structured as a landscape distinctly divided into sky and field,
may be Mitchell’s clearest response to Vincent van Gogh’s work. After decades
of refusing direct representation, Mitchell channels the powerful themes of
death and isolation in van Gogh’s Wheatfield with Crows—one of his last
paintings—into her own meditation on mortality. No Birds also followed the
death of longtime New York dealer Xavier Fourcade amidst Mitchell’s
preparations for a retrospective museum exhibition. These experiences sparked a
reflective mood, tinged with melancholy.
SOUTH, 1989
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions:
1021/2 × 1571/2 in. (260.4 × 400.1 cm)
Fondation
Louis Vuitton, Paris
© Estate of
Joan Mitchell
This
exuberantly analytical two-panel painting flickers as a double image—two
reflections of a mountain, made and viewed side-by-side. Looking at this work
unleashes a process of comparison as the eye of the viewer leaps back and
forth, unfolding the drama of painting as a sequence of decisions. Here,
Mitchell returns to a foundational source: Paul Cézanne. South springs from
Cézanne’s views of Mont Sainte-Victoire to reveal Mitchell’s complex and
experimental thought process while she worked.
“LOVE IS THE CONDITION OF
ARRIVING AT INFINITY”:
JOAN MITCHELL &
POETRY
The first full monograph
on Joan Mitchell was written when she was in her early sixties. In preparatory
interviews with the curator Judith Bernstock, which stretched over seven days
at the artist’s home in Vétheuil, Mitchell time and again returned to poetry as
a foundational force in her work. Indeed, the first sentence of the monograph
considers the two arts as equals: “Inspired by her parents as a child growing
up in Chicago, Joan Mitchell developed a love for poetry and painting.” Her
mother, Marion Strobel, was a notable figure among Chicago’s literati,
publishing poetry, novels, and reviews, and was an associate editor of Poetry
magazine from 1920 to 1925. Mitchell grew up with poets regularly visiting the
apartment on Chicago’s North Side. When Mitchell wrote a precociously
restrained poem at the age of nine, it seemed entirely logical that Strobel
would submit it to Poetry’s editor, Harriet Monroe, for consideration. Mitchell
could still remember the poem’s last line more than half a century later, and
recited it to Bernstock: “And bleakness comes through the trees without sound.”
She liked it, she noted, for the line’s “feeling for sound and silence.”1 Strobel
was partially deaf, so Mitchell associated poetry—perhaps surprisingly—with
silence. For all her mother’s socializing, it was the look of poetry on the
page that moved Mitchell, as did the sight of her mother at her desk, deeply
absorbed in her work.2
Beyond a few newspaper
reviews at the time of publication, little critical attention has been paid to
Strobel’s work. She published two volumes of poetry when Mitchell was very
small—Once in a Blue Moon (1925) and Lost City (1928)—both of which contained
sections devoted to her children and motherhood. As the jacket to Once in a
Blue Moon rather patronizingly put it, the poems capture “all the moods of
young womanhood—moods that are in turn gay, tender, capricious, pathetic and
defiant—in transparent verses that are as musical and direct as bird songs.”3
They were also lyric poems through and through: short, intensely rhyming, and
often focused on an experience of love so strong that it felt like loss. Lyric
was a meditation designed to evoke feeling, as opposed to the rationalizations
of prose. It created a psychological interiority, a perceiving eye. Though it
had been the dominant mode in the Western European tradition since Greek
antiquity (suffering a slight decline in England and France in the eighteenth
century but enjoying a revival in the nineteenth century with Romantic poetry),
it had recently fallen out of favor, dismissed by early twentiethcentury poets
like William Carlos Williams as emphasizing melodious language rather than a
complexity of thought.4 The characterization was a little unfair—lyric poetry
can evoke complex emotion—but lyric does often rely on a sentimentality that
confirms rather than extends the reader’s emotional vocabulary. While Strobel
was quick to sense this sentimentality as an editor, traces of it appear in her
poetry. For example, the last poem of Lost City, “A Cloak for Joan,” turns on a
series of self-abnegations. The speaker gifts the child a beautiful cloak and
almost immediately anticipates her throwing it away. The protection she has to
offer—even the words in the poem—will not hold the child, and the speaker
cannot do anything other than end with a facile compliment: the fabric looks
“pretty with your hair.”5
Within lyric poetry, this
attentiveness to the queasy pleasures of diminishment was (and is) nothing
unusual; as Laura Quinney has pointed out, “a disproportionate number of lyric
and meditative poems concern disappointment—not just those that address
individual disappointments, as for example, disappointments in love, but those
that plumb the generalized, chronic condition.”6 Critiquing Strobel’s poetry,
one could argue that the leap from the individual to the generalized sometimes
falters in her verse, remaining within a very particular understanding of love
(well-to-do, heteronormative, feminized) that assumes it is more universal than
it is. The same criticism could be made of Strobel’s novels, which all deal
with the private scandals of women of means on Chicago’s North Side—namely,
with whom they fall in love, and what they decide to do about it.7 A character
at the climax of Fellow Mortals (1935) claims, “Every woman’s intent is
love”—and is not corrected.8
Mitchell’s allegiance to
lyric poetry was not to her mother’s writing but to the promises lyric poetry
made as a genre about the self in relation to the world. Lyric poetry was a way
to think and access grand ideas, unrepentant in their scale: a love that
stretched outward, to encompass nature and the infinite. In her final term
paper on the Romantics at Smith College, Mitchell sliced and diced her way
through the pantheon of nineteenth-century greats (Percy Bysshe Shelley, Thomas
Carlyle, Charles Lamb, Thomas De Quincey, William Hazlitt, Lord Byron, John
Keats, and even Charles Dickens), categorizing each of their stances on
transcendentalism (“whether the source of faith be in the mind or sense”) with
a series of confident, though somewhat impenetrable, declarations. She treated
them as philosophers rather than poets, noting their position, but paying little
attention to the formal qualities of their poetry. Yet out of nowhere, toward
the end of her second paragraph in the essay, she offered a seeming non
sequitur: “Love is the condition of arriving at infinity.”9
The sentence is out of
place in Mitchell’s essay, flashing out from the page like a lighthouse on a
distant point—there is no call for it in the context of what she is actually
discussing—but it is entirely at home in the context of Mitchell’s painting
career. Her paintings are often engulfing in scale and color and texture; they
stretch utterance in the way that poetry stretches past prose, elliptically
harnessing the world. Poetry contained a fullness of thought that resisted
explanation, and which accessed emotion more directly than prose. To Irving
Sandler, she noted that the feelings she strove to express in her painting were
“the qualities that differentiate a line of poetry from a line of prose.”10 To
Bernstock, Mitchell said that she had never looked for a meaning in a poem: “It
seemed perfectly clear. If it’s not spelled out, it doesn’t matter. That’s how
I feel about my painting.”11 In lyric poetry, absolutes are often treated like
directions without limit: an arrow flying, never hitting. Rainer Maria Rilke,
who was one of Mitchell’s favorite poets, is a particularly good example; in
his poems, even his memories appear to stand outside time, charged with the
platonic potential of each object. He is interested in transformation rather
than causality.12 Mitchell’s paintings also aimed at revelation rather than
just realization, a swiftness of comprehension. She paid close attention to how
lyric poets charted the paradoxes of intuition, of knowledge lagging, then
leaping. William Wordsworth defined poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of
powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in
tranquility.”13 Comfortable with the quiet contradictions undergirding this
definition (Spontaneity and reflection? Overflow and tranquility?), Mitchell
hewed close to these terms when describing the subjects of her own painting.
Her often-quoted remark that she painted from “remembered landscapes that I
carry with me—and remembered feelings of them, which of course become
transformed” is remarkably precise in echoing Wordsworth, even though the comment
was made more than a decade after she had graduated college.14
By the time Bernstock
visited Mitchell in Vétheuil, it is obvious that Mitchell had absorbed certain
formal elements of poetry—namely, the genre’s ability to move rather than
persuade. The space that poetry often gives to words encourages the reader to
consider them more closely. Shades of pause (line breaks, indents, stanza
breaks) make us better interpreters of what is generally understood as silence.
White space both slows and speeds up the reader, and so the constant gauging of
distance and intimacy is more pronounced. It seems no accident that Mitchell
used white paint as distinctively as she did, creating space and light in ways
comparable to a poet’s positioning of a line break. (Hemlock [1956, plate 24],
named after “Domination of Black” by Wallace Stevens, is a particularly good
and early example of this.) As she noted, painting was a process of perception,
the continual observation of the relationships emerging on the picture plane:
“The way to do it is relationship, relationship.”15 Multipanel works like
Clearing (fig. 2) or Ode to Joy (A Poem by Frank O’Hara) (1970–71, plate 75)
could even be paintings of poems about landscapes rather than paintings of
landscapes. The panels operate like pages; within each, a series of rectangular
or square blocks of color echo one another just as verses do in an open book of
poetry held at a distance, the verses aligning and drifting away from one
another.
These formal echoes are
slight, and it is easy to overinterpret them. To those who know Mitchell mainly
for her time in New York in the 1950s, when she was part of a sprawling social
circle centered around the downtown abstract art world, it might come as a
surprise that Bernstock’s catalogue devotes limited attention to this period.
Mitchell emphasized the painters she encountered (Jackson Pollock, Willem de
Kooning, Franz Kline, Arshile Gorky) and her membership in The Club (launched
by a number of first-generation abstractionists in 1948), and she noted her
association with other female painters around her age, like Grace Hartigan and
Helen Frankenthaler. However, Mitchell obviously did not consider the title
“second-generation Abstract Expressionist” to be particularly meaningful, nor
did she reflect on the collaborative esprit de corps that characterized the
scene.
Most New York painters
and poets agreed with Baudelaire’s maxim that various art forms might “lend one
another new energies,” and one of the first organized discussions at The Club
concerned the relationship between painting and poetry. (Other panel topics
that year included the relationship between art and architecture and the
painter as editor.) It was expected that an artist be well-read in areas other
than visual art. Given Mitchell’s upbringing, this would have suited her just
fine, but she did not see the need to speculate on what the arts gave each
other. To Bernstock, she did not emphasize her collaboration with John Ashbery
for The Poems, one of four limited-edition books issued by the Tiber Press.16
These were large, self-consciously beautiful objects, typeset by hand and
printed on fine paper, and obviously recalled the tradition of European livres
d’artistes, making a case for a shared set of sensibilities between artists and
poets. The painter Fairfield Porter, reviewing all four books for Art News,
thought the most successful collaboration was Ashbery and Mitchell’s,
commenting, “she seems to treat her poet with sensitive understanding and
respect. They are both abstract, and her graphic illustrations combine into
page designs in which the illustration looks like writing, with Ashbery’s
lightness of touch.”17 Mitchell would have likely shared Porter’s skepticism of
a collaborative rationale that considered one art form as reducible or directly
proportionate to another. Elsewhere, Porter wrote dismissively of Wyndham
Lewis’s writing on Pablo Picasso, observing that Lewis “looks at paintings
through the spectacles of words and without those spectacles would be blind. He
does not know the difference between the pictures and his talk about them.”18 A
distinction between forms had to be preserved and respected; without this
distinction, any emotion would be flattened, turned into an archetypal paste of
creativity that connected artworks by equalizing them. It was significant that
Porter noticed—and praised—the ways in which Mitchell respected the
self-sufficiency of Ashbery’s verse.
Mitchell also did not
recall to Bernstock her collaborative discussion with Frank O’Hara, Elaine de
Kooning, Norman Bluhm, and Michael Goldberg, which was recorded over three
nights, condensed, and published as “5 Participants in a Hearsay Panel” in It
Is (1959). This purported transcript of comments made during an evening at The
Club began:
JOAN: We’ll open with a
question. Is style hearsay?
FRANK: Well, Pavia says,
nowadays everyone talks about you behind your back in front of your face.
ELAINE: Yes, Philip
Guston told Andrew Wyeth that Louis B. Mayer told John Huston: Well, if you
don’t like it here, go back to Greenwich Village and starve on a hundred
dollars a week.19
The obvious joke was that
everyone was always quoting someone else. In this emergent scene, a slippery
triangulation of authority emerged from aestheticizing gossip. But in the text,
Mitchell’s presence was limited: her comments were brief, and often
referee-like (for example, “Now, possibly, the panel will discuss the question
of craftsmanship”). The social scene in New York caused Mitchell a great deal
of anxiety, and she later observed that her relationship with the art world “is
distant, and occurs mainly through individuals”—no triangulation necessary.20
It was probably her close friendship with O’Hara that prompted Mitchell’s
participation in “5 Participants.”
As the artist Larry
Rivers noted at O’Hara’s funeral in 1966, “There are at least sixty people in
New York who thought Frank O’Hara was their best friend.”21 Reading O’Hara’s
letters to Mitchell, you can see why. He had a wonderful habit of imagining—in
type—what the other was thinking, conducting a conversation on the page well in
advance of the reader. This habit of imaginative projection structured his
poetry, which made no bones about its epistolic roots. In 1959, for example, he
began a letter to Mitchell by noting that he had just come from lunch with
Bluhm—and with it, he included a poem (“Adieu to Norman, Bon Jour to Joan and
JeanPaul”) that had obviously been written just before lunch with Bluhm.22 Both
letter and poem began by covering the same ground: O’Hara’s forthcoming weekend
trip to Southampton, the book of poems he was working on (and how helpful
Mitchell’s studio on St. Mark’s Place had been in providing some peace and
quiet). In his letter to Mitchell, he imagined her days in Paris, and in the
poem, he also wished he were “reeling around Paris/ instead of reeling around
New York.” As he noted in his looping cursive at the top of the page, both poem
and letter were written under the cloud of a hangover. It was an extraordinary
performance. To be invited, so swiftly and gracefully, onto the stage of
another’s art making—to witness his regard for her settle into a poem—must have
been just as beguiling to Mitchell as it was to the numerous others that O’Hara
mentioned in his poetry.
O’Hara is best known for
his “I do this, I do that” poems, which (at least in their beginnings) recall
the artist Joe Brainard’s description of O’Hara’s walk: “Light and sassy. With
a slight twist and a slight bounce. It was a beautiful walk. Confident. ‘I
don’t care,’ and sometimes, ‘I know you are looking.’”23 Yet O’Hara’s eye for
exhilaration made it easy to overlook the elegiac undertows in his poetry—but
Mitchell, raised on a diet of lyric poetry, would have noticed. Consider “Poem
Read at Joan Mitchell’s” (1957), written for a celebration of Jane Freilicher
and Joe Hazan’s marriage at Mitchell’s. Midway through the poem, O’Hara pauses,
considers the avalanche of details he began with, the coordinates of that
moment in time and space (the date, the time, even the weather), then shifts
tone: “This poem goes on too long because our friendship has been long. . . . /
and I would make it as long as I hope our friendship lasts if I could make
poems that long.” It is an impossible wish— for both friendship and poetry—and
he knows it. The most he can hope for is that Freilicher and Hazan’s happiness
is a “sign that we will be happy too.”24 Similarly, the climax of “Adieu to
Norman, Bon Jour to Joan and Jean-Paul” (1964) also operates as a charm to ward
off loss: “the only thing to do is simply continue/ is that simple/ yes, it is
simple because it is the only thing to do.” But O’Hara does not end here. The
last stanza is a list of all things that O’Hara, on faith, assumes are
continuing: in Paris, “the Seine continues,” “the Bar Américain continues to be
French,” and “Jane Hazan continues to be Jane Freilicher (I think!).” He asks
fellow poets “René Char, Pierre Reverdy, Samuel Beckett it is possible isn’t
it.” (He had met Beckett while visiting Mitchell and Ashbery in Paris the year
before.) The final line concludes: “I love Reverdy for saying yes, though I
don’t believe it.”25 The poem is so celebratory that it is easy to overlook O’Hara’s
refusal, tucked in at the very end.
In an optimistic reading
of the disappointments recounted in lyric poetry, one may lose the girl or the
boy or one’s self-regard, but that loss is compensated by new self-knowledge.26
O’Hara hewed to this trade-off, or at the very least, to the sense that there
was a set of scales to be balanced. Less so did Ashbery, which is perhaps why
Mitchell never thoroughly warmed to his poetry, even though they overlapped for
almost a decade in Paris, from 1955 to 1965, when they lunched together almost
weekly, and although Ashbery sensitively reviewed her work for Art News. In his
poetry, Ashbery persistently thwarts the reader’s expectations of an easily
legible emotional arc, resolving then questioning, admitting then sidestepping;
in general, he was a little suspicious of the swift or singular grace of
revelation.27 On a visit to Paris with O’Hara in 1961, the poet Bill Berkson
recalled Mitchell reading the page proofs of Ashbery’s experimental long poem
“Europe” and remarking, “God! How I worked over that poem!” To her, it was
about the “death of culture.”28 More than twenty years later, Mitchell directed
Berkson to “early, lyrical” poems of Ashbery’s for them to discuss.29
By then, Mitchell had
been painting in earnest for forty years, and had lived in Vétheuil for twenty.
She had settled into a working routine in relative isolation, close to nature,
with a domestic life populated by the same pleasures that James Schuyler
celebrated in his poetry. His long poem “A Few Days”—after which Mitchell
titled two paintings (fig. 4)—catalogs many of them (“a Remington Rand, my
Olivetti, the ashtray and the coffee cup”) and darts into side valleys of
memory, occasionally stepping back, noticing the views beyond: “And there was
goldenrod and tattered Queen Anne’s lace and the noble Hudson/ on which just
one sailboat sailed, billowing, on a weekday afternoon.”30 These are remembered
landscapes as much as Mitchell’s paintings are, the line breaks like
well-placed oar strokes moving the reader through the poem at unhurried and
elegant speed. The details of these days appear ahistorical, as does Mitchell’s
painting in its unwavering intensity of light and color. For Mitchell, this was
never a problem. To Bernstock she noted that “lyric” was “now [generally
considered] a dirty word,” as was “nature.”31 It is always tempting to
understand Mitchell’s painting and Schuyler’s poetry as more universal than
they actually are: their sense of scale was far greater than, say, Strobel’s,
though it was always bounded by class and a very particular canon. Neither was
particularly interested in acknowledging those larger limits; it just did not
seem that interesting or profitable. It seemed better to explore “pure”
paradoxes of sensation and consciousness as a condition of being rather than to
interrogate the historical and political assumptions that undergirded them.
To Mitchell, it was
little more than historical accident and art gallery whim that meant Schuyler,
O’Hara, Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and Barbara Guest were conclusively grouped
together as the New York School poets. John Bernard “Johnny” Myers, cofounder
of the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, coined the phrase in a piece for Nomad magazine
in 1962, more than a decade after the poets had met and started collaborating
with one another and their artist friends, many of whom were represented by de
Nagy. Myers had instigated a number of these collaborative projects, and the
poets themselves saw the label as a marketing convenience rather than an
aesthetically meaningful title. Mitchell was already skeptical of Myers
(painfully, the gallery had not chosen to represent her when she was starting
out in New York), but she was also more aware (than many U.S. readers) of other
traditions in which she situated her friends’ work. She knew, for example, how
important French poets like Char, Reverdy, and Paul Verlaine were to O’Hara (to
Koch, O’Hara wrote, “I’d rather be dead than not have France around my neck
like a rhinestone dog-collar”32), or how the well-established French tradition
of antitraditional poetry could rejuvenate poetry written in English. (The fact
that both Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot had suggested as much in print in the
early twentieth century, entirely independently from each other, suggests how
unfamiliar contemporary French poetry was to the general reader of poetry in
the United States.33) Mitchell also saw how English poetry tended to emphasize
the concrete, and French poetry the conceptual. Paul Auster clarified the
difference when he noted Yves Bonnefoy’s observation that English poetry
operated like a mirror, and French poetry like a sphere: “the one Aristotelian
in its acceptance of the given, the other platonic in its readiness to
hypothesize a ‘different reality, a different realm.’”34 Even before she moved
to France, Mitchell was predisposed to be interested in spheres as well as
mirrors, in platonic realities rather than Aristotelian ones. (In at least one
studio, she kept a long-distance mirror so she could take in the overall effect
of a painting all at once, rather than in parts. The reflective effect of a
sphere is the same.) Mitchell would have been able to sympathize with her
friend Beckett (“everything Beckett has ever done” was important to her art,
she told Bernstock35) and his frustrations translating Endgame from French to
English. In the play, Clov addresses Hamm and says, “Il n’y a plus de roues de
bicyclette”; Beckett complained to a correspondent that the English equivalent
“There are no more bicycle wheels” did not convey the much larger problem that
the line in French did: that bicycle wheels as a category had ceased to
exist.36 Mitchell understood these transatlantic crosscurrents: what it might
mean, for example, for O’Hara to write in “Flag Day,” “It seems that
everything’s merely a token/ of some vast inexplicable feeling.” She understood
the value of the inexplicable, in honoring the categorical rather than the
specific.
Mitchell’s interest in
lyric poetry—sustained over a lifetime—gave her a frame large enough to exist
independently of her friends, and distinct enough for her to be particular in
her reading (fig. 5). When Bernstock asked about her favorite poets, Mitchell
replied, “John Donne, shall we start from there?”37 She saw the value in
Parnassus, a crowded hill of poets: Rilke to her left, O’Hara and Jean Genet to
her right, Wordsworth chatting to Stéphane Mallarmé, and Baudelaire just
beyond. And in 1975, she also embarked on a number of what she termed “color
abstracts,” selecting short poems and fragments from longer ones, then framing
or overlaying the words with atmospheric washes and lines of pastel, working
with texts by Jacques Dupin, J. J. Mitchell, Schuyler, Pierre Schneider, and
Chris Larson—all young friends, or close friends of close friends.38 Her
choices were remarkably reminiscent of her mother’s verse half a century
before: just as brief and emotional, just as attentive to loss and love. The
most well-known of these poem-pastels, for example, reproduces Schuyler’s
“Daylight” (plate 80): “And when I thought,/ ‘Our love might end’/ the sun/
went right on shining.” She selected poems that recalled the epistolic as well,
choosing a poem by J. J. Mitchell (that began “Dear/ Joan”), which was titled
“Frank O’Hara’s Birthday.” More than a few were exercises in intimacy; in the
pastel Sally Up My Alley, Mitchell listed nicknames for her family members
(“Mitchie/ Poondie/ Newtie/ Joanie/ Jimmy”)—though it was J. J. (no relation)
who had written the source poem, rather than Joan Mitchell herself. In retyping
their words (sometimes meant for her, sometimes not, but always for a
particular other), she deflected and reflected the lyric outward, inviting the
unknown viewer to listen in on a party-line phone call.
Intimacy functions like a
skipping stone in these collaborations, the frames of address widening but
never losing focus. In this sense, love could aspire to infinity. O’Hara’s
presence is clear, even a decade after his death. In his mock manifesto
“Personism”—written in 1959 in an hour, and which retains the sharp
improvisatory edge of something written in a rush—O’Hara suggested that one of
Personism’s aspects “is to address itself to one person (other than the poet
himself), thus evoking overtones of love without destroying love’s life-giving
vulgarity, and sustaining the poet’s feelings towards the poem while preventing
love from distracting him into feelings about the person.”39 For O’Hara,
affection could act as a kind of creative catalyst, but it shouldn’t be a
smooth trade. Your love (for anyone and anything) could—and should—direct the
focus of your own art without collapsing into sentimentality. The person and
the art were related—even mutually sustaining—but never the same. It was a
distinction that Mitchell, who had spent so much of her life working from
feeling, would have appreciated. For Mitchell, poetry was a call across water,
a model for hailing one another. It gave her a form in which to feel the world.
https://artbma.org/exhibition/joan-mitchell/catalogue
JOAN MITCHELL
Joan Mitchell (1925-1992)
was an abstract artist whose prolific career spanned more than four decades.
She worked in a variety of mediums—including oil on canvas, pastel on paper,
and lithographic printing—and is widely recognized as one of the most
significant artists of the post-war era.
Born in Chicago on
February 12, 1925, Mitchell attended the School of the Art Institute of
Chicago. Upon graduating in 1947, she was awarded a travel fellowship that took
her to France for a year, where her paintings became increasingly abstract.
Returning to the United States in 1949, Mitchell settled in New York and became
an active participant in the “New York School” of painters and poets. She
exhibited in the famous “9th Street Show” in 1951, and soon established a
reputation as one of the leading young Abstract Expressionist painters. In
1955, Mitchell began dividing her time between New York and France, and in 1959
she settled permanently in France, living and working in Paris. In 1968, she
moved to Vétheuil, a small town northwest of Paris, where she worked
continuously until her death in 1992.
Over her long and
prolific career, the defining elements of Mitchell’s world—water, trees, dogs,
poetry, music—created images and memories from which she worked. She once said,
"I paint from remembered landscapes that I carry with me—and remembered
feelings of them, which of course become transformed. I could certainly never
mirror nature. I would like more to paint what it leaves me with." She
observed her landscape intensely, and her acute visual observations of form,
space, and color in life were part of the visual memories she drew upon while
painting
Mitchell achieved
significant critical and commercial success in her lifetime, exhibiting
regularly in New York and Paris throughout the later decades of her life. The
Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of
Modern Art, and other major institutions began collecting her paintings in the
1950s. Her work was the subject of a mid-career retrospective exhibition at the
Whitney Museum in 1974. In 1982, Mitchell became the first female American
artist to have a solo exhibition at the Musee d'art moderne de la Ville de
Paris. A retrospective exhibition, The Paintings of Joan Mitchell: Thirty-six
Years of Natural Expressionism, toured the United States in 1988, with stops at
the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; the San Francisco Museum of Art;
the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; the La Jolla Museum of
Contemporary Art, La Jolla, California; and the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of
Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York.
Mitchell’s major awards
and accomplishments include: Le Grand Prix des Arts (Peinture) of the City of
Paris (1991); the Award for Painting from the French Ministry of Culture
(1989); the inaugural Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement from
the College Art Association of America (1988); Honorary Doctorates from the
School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1987) and The Western College, Oxford,
Ohio (1971); and the Premio Lissone, Milan (1961).
As an extension of her
commitment to sustaining an environment of dedication and camaraderie among
artists, Mitchell gave personal support to many young artists and writers who
came to stay with her at her home in Vétheuil—sometimes for just one night,
sometimes for an entire summer. Correspondence in her papers reveals that this
generosity often had a life-changing impact on those who spent time with her.
Mitchell died in Paris on
October 30, 1992. Her generosity in her own lifetime continued after her death
with the formation of the Joan Mitchell Foundation, called for in her will in
order to create support and recognition for individual artists. In addition,
the Foundation’s mission includes the promotion and preservation of her legacy,
which includes her remarkable body of work, her papers (including
correspondence and photographs), and other archival materials related to her
life and work.
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